


The Tar Beneath Your Skin

by Yarpfish



Category: Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: Codependency, I Love This Pairing So Much, Other, Post Film, Spoilers, obligatory post film reconnection fic, symbrock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-10
Updated: 2018-10-10
Packaged: 2019-07-29 07:09:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16259192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yarpfish/pseuds/Yarpfish
Summary: “It must be nice,” Annie said, as they sat on the step and their coffee faded from lukewarm to tepid.“Hmm?” ever literate, he responded.“To have your head back. It was so loud and crowded with it in there with me. I have no idea how you managed with it for so long.”“Yeah well, I was acting crazy, you saw that, I’m not sure you could say I was managing,” he shot her a look, which earned him a smile.He’s not...lying.No, he’d spent the the whole time terrified and confused. He’d felt the sickness of fever and delirium. The chilling panic of not knowing if you were in control of your own body, your own mind.But -





	The Tar Beneath Your Skin

Hot, burning orange was so close and so complete in his vision that it seemed to engulf him, the noxious smell of exploding gasoline filling his lungs. The heat was everything and everywhere, but more than the scorching, more than the gut-wrenching sensation of falling, plummeting down, he felt every single tendril of what had been Venom ripped from his body, their screams synchronised and echoing through each other.

**_Goodbye, Eddie_ **

He hit the water and everything went black.

~

“It must be nice,” Annie said, as they sat on the step and their coffee faded from lukewarm to tepid.

“Hmm?” ever literate, he responded.

“To have your head back. It was so loud and crowded with it in there with me. I have no idea how you managed with it for so long.”

“Yeah well, I was acting crazy, you saw that, I’m not sure you could say I was managing,” he shot her a look, which earned him a smile.

 

He’s not...lying.

No, he’d spent the the whole time terrified and confused. He’d felt the sickness of fever and delirium. The chilling panic of not knowing if you were in control of your own body, your own mind.

But-

Anne was good with words.

It was one of the first things he’d noticed about her. It was what made her so unstoppable in her work, drilling down into specific meanings and contexts and derivatives, pinpoint sculpting definitions to argue against the impossible that her client was innocent due to the placement of a comma.

Annie used words like a sniper.

But Eddie, he was a writer, his words were the twist of a knife. He made people feel - outrage, horror, sorrow, guilt, pity as he exposed each story, peeling back the layers to find the heart to make people care. He reflected like a mirror, no matter how removed and unlikely the story was, just imagine if this happened to you.

How could he explain it to someone as talented as him who spoke a different language?

He never found Venom loud or invasively chatty, though it did talk. Maybe it was the way their thoughts ran, maybe in the energy and lack of rhythm that caused it to jutter in Anne’s mind worked at a tempo he understood. He could never explain that to her, even though she’d felt the same weight.

How do you describe to someone comfortable in their own skin what it is to be alone again?

It was someone switching off a radio you’d forgotten was playing, white noise suddenly cut to silence.

It was standing too close to someone, how the air was cold against your skin as they moved away, their warmth fading made the chill all the more noticeable.

It was a meal from your childhood that didn’t taste right.

It was the anticipation of waiting for someone you didn’t know was running late, the claustrophobic feeling of a thin sheet snaked tight and binding around your legs when you’re used to a comforter when you can’t sleep.

It was all those little sensations, patching together wildly, small disconnected dots of sensation. But they weren’t big enough. All correct but not enough to package all that he felt from what happened. Colours of paint but no plan of how they should cover the canvas.

It wasn’t until he’d had one too many - well, several too manys - and suffered the next morning that he felt it. That moment where the pounding in his head faded, his stomach no longer rolling with nausea, and the burn of vomit in his throat dying to memory. That drawn-out moment that balanced between not-well and no-longer-sick, living for a half hour in the echo of pain.

He felt wrung out and….

 

 

...empty.

 

~

He’d never been one for sightseeing.

Nature was just, well, a background wasn’t it? Like meditating, nature wanted him to keep still, stare into the distance, and learn the secrets of his own mind, like he’d suddenly find meaning and inner peace or some bullshit.

A mountain would be there tomorrow, but people were ever changing, he’d much rather follow the constant flux of life.

Architecture was also fucking dull.

It was hard to see the majesty of engineering after years of talking to construction workers, knowing that the poor and the vulnerable died as fat cats sat in their fancy suits with champagne and canapes whilst the desperates lost their hands in unserviced machinery.

He’d never liked the Golden Gate, not with its view of Alcatraz, or the Life Foundation, sitting squat and smug in the hills.

But something, some urge lusted for the bridge.

~

Eddie had never slept well.

With Venom, there just hadn’t been time. In the brief pauses they’d had, he’d been so keyed up on adrenaline and his muscles screaming so loud from exertion that he could barely catch his breath.

It was nothing new. At night, he was always at his weakest, and his worst, and his mind thrilled in showing him the highlights reel.

His dreams were always visual, to make him suffer more, he knew, to really hammer in the images he never wanted to see, the faces of everyone he’d failed. He’d felt disappointment and resentment every single one of the thousand times he’d dreamt of his father, and the bitter misery of his mother’s wasted life. Pressure from an uncaring father to achieve greatness against an ever shifting goal line. Pressure from his job to find more dirt, bigger scandals, greater fallout and sharper pain. The horror of what he would always find, the grief on the faces of wives and the naive disbelief of children, the shock and surprise of colleagues. The bleakness of the world around him whether the people he thrust into the spotlight hid away from the shame, or stood fragile but defiant against the cameras. The collateral lives ruined as the noxious cloud of one mistake oozed wider. He lived in his dreams hollow loneliness and guilt as he saw Annie say night after night that he’d gone too far, this was too much. Goodbye.

But tonight was different. He’d been pathetic and guilty and ashamed, but this was new. Blind terror, almost childlike in its claustrophobic panic.

His vision, his nightly grotesque theatre, was a void of pitch black.

~

_It was scared._

_It had not felt fear before, only desire, drive. Find host, feed._

_But it was so small now, so much burnt away and so far from safety. Far from a warm body with a heart and lungs that could protect it, keep it away from this burning, drying oxygen._

_The water shielded it slightly from the cruel air, but the current was strong, and it cried out in distress as it was cast again and again against the rocks._

_Help was nearby it knew, but it was too weak to remember how, to remember who._

_It did not know what heartache was, but it felt alone and abandoned all the same._

~

He hated this part of town, he thought miserably as he shoved his hands deeply into his pockets and scowling at the group of tourists who stepped out suddenly in front of him. He hated it, but the lure of the bay hadn’t left, as much as he’d tried. It was a growing, insistent nagging against his skull like a migraine, and so he’d given in and walked. He stayed on the street level though, knowing not to trust himself to go near the bridge in his bleak mood.

It was satisfying, even from here, to see that parts of the Life Foundation still smouldered, the ugly blot on the hill,the smooth white marble covered in soot like it was painted in vengeance. A fuck you to to its elitism, a fuck you like a black eye on a bully.

It felt like a cemetery.

It hit him harder than he thought to come back here, harder even than every step toward Annie’s house and seeing that she’d moved on.

The longer he stood there, staring at this view he hated, the more intense the feeling to move away felt. Get away, get far away from here, as though the energy of Riot remained, cursing him and hexing the very ground he’d died on. Away, away from this place of hatred. With a final look, he left.

~

“Dude, check out what I just found! Isn’t it weird!”

He could hear the kids on the beach as they pulled whatever debris from the water.

“Eww, that’s disgusting, what is it?”  
“Iunno, jellyfish?”

“Oh yeah when have you ever heard of a black jellyfish with no tentacles” came the sarcastic response.

“Can’t be, I mean look at it,” one of the boys, no older than eight, poked it with a piece of driftwood.

The scream ricocheted so loudly that it hit him like a shotgun. He fell to his knees, as the world moved on around him unaffected.

When he next remembered himself, his knees and palms stung, asphalt peppered amongst the red raw skin as he’d fallen. The second scream hit before his blood had time to splash onto the floor and he curled tightly inwards, hands clutching his head like the pressure would keep him whole.

At the third scream, he risked turning towards the sound, and from his new position he could see what was at the group’s feet.

To say there was a moment of recognition would be untrue.

Eddie had risen and begun sprinting towards them before his conscious had time to fire.

The sting of the fall was gone, the blood leaving him was nothing.

“ _Get away from him_ ” he screamed.

The pack took one look at him and scattered as two hundred pounds of solid muscle with deranged fury in his eyes barrelled towards them.

Eddie dropped into the slide of a baseball player, he hands scooping the pebbles as his elbow then shoulder hit and sent electric shocks up his arm.

It bristled in his hands, alarmed at the rough treatment and the noise, and drew in on itself. His heart broke as it made a weak attempt to cover itself in spikes.

“Hey, it’s me,” he said, trying to keep his voice soft and calm, ignoring his heart pounding loud in his ears, “it’s Eddie.”

It stopped bristling, the spines pulling in, but continued to writhe and roll up in a tight ball no larger than a peach. He shifted slightly so that instead of cupped hands it settled more securely in the centre of one palm. His finger traced softly over its surface.

“It’s me,” he said again, “I’ve got you. You’re safe now.”

He didn’t know how long he lay there on his side, brushing lightly again and again against the viscous black, cooing soothing whispers at it, but eventually one thin tendril loosened itself from the solid mass, slowly moving up to reach the pad of his finger with a feather of pressure.

Eddie let out a relieved sound, half sob, half laugh, “yeah, ET, it’s me.”

**_M-_ ** it said

The pressure against his finger grew, insistent, until there was no resistance and the symbiote began to melt through his skin. It was slow, so much slower than it had been before, running like treacle or tar, thick and tacky. It didn’t stop, didn’t try to infect every part of him, to almost consume him like it had before, but moved as a mass to settle in his chest, securely inside his ribcage, wrapped around his heart.

**_Mine_ ** it said weakly.

“Yes”, he closed his eyes, breathing deeply like he couldn’t before.

**_Came for me_ ** it said as a question, and a hope.

“Of course,” Eddie said.

“Because, my darling, you are **_mine._ ** ”


End file.
